Noah Cooper

When Klaviyo recruited me three years ago to help architect a system that would deliver hundreds of millions of email messages per hour on behalf of their customers, I thought, "Wow. That's a lot of mail. How could I *not* build that?" Now that we're doing it for real, I still think, "Wow. That's a lot of mail. We *built* that." $3 billion+ in Klaviyo-attributed value. 420 million messages sent in a single hour on #BlackFriday. And over 15,000 customers having their best day ever (🙌) on Klaviyo.  Read our full BFCM By The Numbers report to learn how Klaviyo customers achieved recording-breaking results this #BFCM.

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🤷🏾‍♂️ Nobody cares about your success—so you have to. The biggest challenge in my career has been feeling overlooked or underutilized. Wanting to do more, but not having the agency to do it. Someone on Twitter asked me this, and it was great to reflect on it. Here's my thoughts. People are generally too busy or preoccupied with their own priorities, so aren’t really thinking about you. 👉🏾 So the way I’ve overcome this is by building reputation inside and outside the company. The problem is trust. First, make sure to excel at the job you have, the reason you were hired. That builds reputation and trust. Find areas within your role where you can dive deep and show your unique perspective. Put a special emphasis on demonstrating your value in the area you want more agency in. ✨ Mentor and help others. Earn a reputation as someone who shares and supports your team. ✨ Share on platforms like LinkedIn, so your connections benefit from what you are learning. This builds your external reputation. The freedom you’re looking for will come after people trust your work and character. Continue to demonstrate your ability to get things done. In time, people will value you. And if they don’t, its possible that you need a new environment, which is great to know in the long-run anyway. Hopefully, you’ve grown as you’ve excelled, and you are now more qualified, have more experience to leverage, and can pursue other opportunities where you will feel more valued. #mentormesh #growth

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I've long struggled with calling saying something has "Good" or "Bad" Developer Experience (DX) because it's extremely binary and doesn't really help product teams improve their DX. For that reason when I started the Developer Advocacy program at Twilio and began to work with product teams on improving their DX we ended up creating the "DX Spectrum" framework that is helping product teams evaluate their DX better and helps to answer the question "How do we create a magical developer experience?" https://lnkd.in/ggMmCx_e

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To all my fellow dev leaders, what's something you've learned through your growth that you didn't realize early on? For me, it's been empathy and simplicity. As a dev leader, you're often asked to provide simple answers to complex problems and give estimates of when they'll be ready. This makes up a significant part of the job. To build trust and clarity, you need to empathize with your clients' needs (both internal and external), fully understand the customer need, and platform or service you're delivering on. This ensures you're delivering value and maintaining trust. I've learned to say "I understand" more than I've uttered "are you crazy?!". When I was a junior developer, I tended to overcomplicate problems to justify my expertise. But as I grew and learned from mentors, I realized most people want to know three things: Can it be fixed? When can it be done? What do I need to do? Like a car repair, they want clear, straightforward answers, not technical jargon. With that, rather than outright reject a new feature or revision simply because I didn't want to fix the problem or undo work I've done — I've learned to see every bit of feedback as an opportunity to enhance features and bring things closer to the customer's expectation — a valuable insight in building great products. In delivering, I'm not always perfect (I've learned to be imperfect) and often rethink my approach, but to me this represents growth and persistence. It's about striving to deliver the best results and meeting expectations. Sometimes we have answers right away, but I find my trust goes further when I thoroughly think through the process, even if it means rethinking within reason to ensure we're meeting every expectation above and beyond. This isn't about inefficiency or indecisiveness; it's about delivering the best possible results. So, what's something you've learned on your journey in dev leadership?

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Product is fun, complex, messy, and there are no shortcuts. Once you accept that—and embrace it—amazing things happen to your career. Cat Hicks, PhD puts this better than anyone: "Doing research with developer teams, something that really strikes me is how much people look for ways to make complex problems easy rather than make it easy to work on complex problems What I mean is, sometimes it's really useful to admit we just are trying to accomplish tough things. Asking how we can support our teams who NEED the time and space to work through that, it's often a much more tractable lever than trying to change the inherent nature of the work I think it behooves me to say as a psychologist here that I think people are actually really excellent at working on complex problems! It's one of the reasons research with developers is so great. Overall devs love to learn, love to be curious, love to innovate. It is core stuff. What would it look like if we could ask, "how do I make this the absolute best environment for complex problem-solving" instead of "how do I take away all these annoying hard problems." The stuff we want to accomplish in the world is hard. But can be joyful to accomplish."

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I was recently asked what’s the single most important trait that sets apart good leaders? My answer - providing air cover. In other words, delegating thoughtfully. Too many times I see leaders simply adding stuff to the plates of their directs without helping take something off. Passing down asks from the top with no filtration or sense of priority whatsoever. As a leader you have a broader view of the landscape than your team. Use it. Resist the instinct to simply push things down as opaque directives. For instance, something like “Hey this just cropped up. Looks urgent. Can you take care of it?” simply suggests ‘something’ has to be done. But the recipient has no idea why it’s urgent, what the impact is and what is needed of them. Instead “Hey this just cropped up and seems to be affecting customers. I’d like an update on the number of customers impacted so we can better prioritize.” gives them the context they need and makes it clear what you need from them. Not all situations present itself with context, especially in fast paced environments. But it’s key to be transparent, by acknowledging lack of context and actually following up when more info becomes available. “This is a developing situation and there isn’t a lot of context. Until we have more, treat this as top priority. I’ll follow up when we have more.” - goes a long way in fostering a vested interest and a sense of partnership. Without air cover, your team may self organize to a point. But sooner than later they will stop seeing things as a challenge and start feeling jaded. Instead, go that little extra mile, and you will greatly increase the chances of better outcomes, and preserve your teams’ sanity.

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Question for engineering leaders (managers, directors, VP's, etc): I'm curious about the current landscape of developer productivity analysis + management tools - things like LinearB and Jellyfish. Which tool, if any, are you using? Any opinions/pros/cons on the tool you're using (or the entire domain overall)?

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Tech debt causally harms cost-of-change and meantime to adapt to market. You release a defect free, fully functioning piece of software that will *never change* but its code design is a mess. Would you care about tech debt? NO! Why? Because you don't need to change it. It works. It could be written in Whitespace or BrainF**k. Who cares. Nobody is going to look at it. What if it had a tiny change maybe once a year? How much would you care then? A bit more. Maybe Whitespace is ruled out but if it took a couple of days to work out what was happening would there be any business value in paying down the debt? 1 week of refactoring would take nearly 3 years before you break even. Not worth it. This isn't a hypothetical, I have built and maintained software which fits this exact scenario. When does the debt start to have a negative affect on cost-of-change and meantime to adapt to market? Once a quarter? Once a month? Now imagine that you are making hundreds of changes a day. How much is that tech debt costing your business now? And this is assuming that the software is 100% bug free and perfectly functioning. Now extend that, you are making hundreds of changes a day and the internal quality issues are causing you to create bugs which has the knock on effect of harming the user and customer's productivity. Devaluing your product. What's the cost of that debt to your business now? As engineers we need to talk more about how we are protecting and investing in technology in order to reduce cost-of-change and meantime to adapt to market, rather than talk technical debt. Because if we don't need to change or change rarely, then technical debt is not a problem.

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I once asked a lead engineer on Angular: Which is better: Angular or React? His response: "Both require good engineering to be effective." So, my developer friends, consider this a reminder that "frameworks" like Diátaxis are fine, but they still require good engineering--such as UX, information architecture, style, maintenance processes, and so on--to create great documentation experiences for your customers. Alas, the framework alone isn't enough.

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It's probably no surprise to anyone that knows me well, that I love self-development podcasts. One of my favorite is Ramit Sethi's I will teach you to be rich (aka Money for Couples). I recently got this email newsletter When I ask people what their Rich Life looks like, most people say something like: "I want to do what I want, when I want."   Success is rarely a dollar amount. Most people want a lifestyle. In the workplace, this means having a flexible job.    Which might look like: -Never having to do the daily commute to the office -Having a schedule that lines up with when you’re most productive -Taking a spin class in the middle of the day -Picking up your kids from school every afternoon -Living in different countries for several months at a time If this describes your idea of a great job, Pinterest is for you. Check out the 75 open roles in engineering: https://lnkd.in/gapDB_u3 At Pinterest, we hire smart people and trust them to do a good job. We don't track how often you badge into a building or how many days you show up in the office. We care about the business impact your code generates. We know that in person collaboration is useful, and we come in the office about 1/week. This isn't an unbreakable rule that you will get punished for violating. We want you to be your best you and to do your best work. We believe that flexibility enhances creativity and productivity. If you see something that calls to you, reach out and I am happy to answer questions.

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🛠️ Okay y'all, looking for advice: I'm running a handful of small apps for Build Carolina's Development Studio initiative. These are low-utilization apps for relatively small audiences. I'm leaning heavily on Rails at the moment but expect to bring on some JS-stack projects in the near future (likely Next, but I'm always open to the flavor of the week in JavaScript 😅) Here's what I'm finding for hosting: - I still know Heroku best, but I just don't trust them to not enshittify further. 🫠 Every new app here is a liability when Marc decides he needs another island or whatever. 💰 - I'm using a lot of Render and like their devex philosophy, but their pricing is weird (per-service + premium tiers? Pick one!), the big feature gaps in their platform have gone long-unaddressed, and their support has been poor. 🤖 - I'm experimenting with Fly.io: great pricing, but a weird mix of UI-vs-CLI workflows and segmenting project resources is unintuitive. I feel like I'm going to wake up to a huge bill because I accidentally over-provisioned something here. 💸 I'm curious what other folks are doing for small-scale artisanal app hosting in 2024+. Are we all running our own EC2 clusters? Is everyone just writing Next apps for Vercel? Maybe I'm just an old fuddy-duddy looking for a backend host in a static SPA world. 👴 ❓ Tips/tricks/tales welcome. Where are you hosting your lil' bytes right now?

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Tech CEOs, is your team struggling with execution speed? Time to unblock your flywheel. Better handovers and faster throughput. Comment "flywheel" below OR direct message me for a quick tool to map things out.

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There's an oft-cited stat from Pendo that 80% of software features are rarely, if ever, used. While it's impossible to know the accuracy of that, it's not hard to believe. I've been part of multiple feature factories, where emphasis was put on new features to 'claim' rather than taking time to ensure we've actually solved the desired problem before moving onto the next. If you're a Product Manager/Leader in the Indy area, join us on August 14 for a conversation around best practices for measuring product success. We'll have food, drinks, and hopefully some great learnings! (Registration link in the comments)

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What’s everyone using for browser tab management? In today’s day and age, a lot of work happens in browser tabs- and a cluttered browser is like a cluttered desk. It’s going to be hard to find you need. And honestly, despite how much browsers are used for work, I haven’t seen any solutions really *nail* it. And many have completely different approaches to their user experience. Compare this to a product category with a more common UX language, like mapping products. Think: if you were a heavy Google Maps user, would you be able to use the Apple Maps app if you were opening it for the first time? Probably. This isn't the quite the case with browser tab management. I’ve used Workona in the past. I’m also aware of some other options, including Toby ✌️, Octab, TabExtend, TablerOne, Session Buddy, etc. So- what are you using? What works for you? Why do you like it?

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As always Jörg helps AEM developers to understand why they should not underestimate the effects of their coding practices. Being aware of the logics implemented enables to really achieve best performances on any platform

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Reforge published my artifact 🎉 How to use a driver tree to assess a business outcome for #ProductManagers. The artifact library (free to use!) provides real examples to help PMs develop their craft. The driver tree I've shared is fully functional. Open the spreadsheet and give it a try 👉 https://lnkd.in/gMPxDffc

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While some folks hire entire Figma design teams for their personal websites, I'm here at 6:30 AM explaining to my partner why I need a third coffee to "write stuff." 2022: "I'll share monthly insights about building companies!" 2024: checking it -> Writing consistency matches crypto winter performance 📉 But look - AI got better at English faster than I got better at writing. That's what we call product-market fit. New strategy for 2025 - Actually write 12 articles - Convince partner these dawn coffee raids are essential business ops Track my progress (or lack thereof) here: https://lnkd.in/e6bkkxvH P.S. If my partner reads this - yes, this is exactly what I'm doing at 6:00 AM either wiring or reading the book. Note: Will open source my coffee consumption metrics in Q3 2025. Full transparency, like web3 promised.

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Kicking off the month with fresh features! We’ve rolled out some exciting updates in Typo:  ➡️ Managed Automated Alerts on emails, Slack  ➡️ Developer Performance Summary Across Sprints  ➡️ New Help Docs  ➡️ Speed Enhancements Check them out  ⤵️

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Wow, impressive! Amazon achieved higher accuracy by automating code upgrade workstreams with AI, resulting in * 4.5k dev hours saved, and * $260M in annualized efficiency gains …in just 6 months. Check out this post- #ai #genai #appliedai #automation #roi

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